


Experiments in Parenting

by Solea



Series: Wind Verse [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock - Fandom, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst and Humor, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Love, POV Sherlock, Parent!lock, Parentlock, sherlock POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 02:21:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1923099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solea/pseuds/Solea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock navigates treacherous waters with John and Mary's daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Experiments in Parenting

**Author's Note:**

> IF YOU READ THE REST OF THE WORKS IN WINDVERSE READ THESE NOTES FIRST:
> 
> This fic takes place after the events of [East Wind Blows](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1178759) and the not-yet-written events of [Howling Wind.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1435591)
> 
> There are characters in this fic the presence of which may be considered spoilers. However, none of the events of The East Wind Blows or Howling Wind are mentioned specifically here and the fic can stand more or less alone. You have been warned! 
> 
> PS. I'm totally going to finish writing Howling Wind. I have an outline and everything!! This was just stuck in my head and I really wanted to write it.

Finally. _Finally_. I leap out of my chair, and lean over the table, staring at the blue fluid as it begins its agonizingly slow progress through the various bits of glassware. Eighteen hours and six trial suspensions and I’ve finally achieved success. By the time it reaches the heated beaker at the end of the process, it will be precisely what I need. Or rather, what Mr. Baker needs. It’s his alibi, after all, that depends on the specific gravity of--

A sniffle. I’m positive that is what I just heard. But.

I shut my eyes, swiftly reviewing the past few hours of...oh.

“ _She’s sleeping on the couch, Sherlock, but she’ll wake in an hour or so...Miyah kept her up all night so I didn’t want to--_ ”

“ _Yes, yes, of course, Mary. Don’t worry, I’ll be right in the kitchen. I’ll hear her. Go, or you’ll be late for Miyah’s appointment_.”

Another sniffle brings me back to the present, and I make my way quietly over to the sliding doors that almost completely shutter the kitchen. Their positioning should have reminded me of my charge immediately, but I had been so distracted by…

I silently slide the door back a crack and peer into the sitting room.

She’s facing the far window pressing her cheek into her stuffed rabbit's head. The tears sliding down her cheeks are visible from across the room and my chest tightens as I fight the urge to rush over and haul her weeping self into my arms.

Shirley and I have much in common. Indeed, the quantity of traits and behaviors she shares with me is astounding considering our lack of biological kinship. Primary among those behaviors and traits is a strong aversion to being caught in a moment of weakness.

However, understanding that hauling her into my arms will not only fail to produce the intended comfort, but also throw that tiny tyrant into a strop the likes of which this flat has not seen since before John’s arrival does not make it any easier to restrain myself.

I take a long breath and relax my hands before turning back to the table. The fluid has hardly made any progress. I seat myself and turn over a new page in my notebook.

Like me, Shirley must be beguiled into accepting comfort. I spare a moment of pity for John for all the years he’s had to deal with that proclivity in me before turning my attention to how to distract his daughter from whatever heartache troubles a six year old.

“Shirley?” There’s a surprised snuffle from across the room and the sounds of small feet padding across the floor. Tiny hands curl around the sliding door and push it back enough for large blue eyes to take in the complicated apparatus on the table.

“Yes Uncle ‘Lock?” Her voice shimmers with newly suppressed tears, and I tighten fingers on the edge of the table, but hold my place.

“I require your assistance.” There’s a pause.

“Daddy says I’m not to go in the kitchen when your chemistry set is out,” she challenges.

“Without supervision, he is certainly right. However, I believe that my presence mitigates his injunction. Will you help me?”

I watch her eyes narrow as she slots unfamiliar words into context. Eventually she nods and pushes the door aside. She creeps into the kitchen as though trespassing on hallowed ground, and I hook an ankle around the chair next to me, angling it out in implied invitation. She carefully kneels on the seat, resting her elbows on the table, her eyes following the progress of the blue liquid through the first channel.

“How can I help?” she asks, her inflection providing me with a wealth of data about what has potentially upset her to the point of tears.

“It’s very important to time the progress of this fluid as it passes through each chamber.” I say, handing her a stopwatch.

She’s already familiar with it, as we used it the previous week to assess how long it took her father to subconsciously react to various physical stimuli while he napped on the couch. She takes it easily in hand her small fingers poised over the appropriate buttons.

“Why?” she asks suddenly, her eyes narrowing. Clever girl, she suspects this is merely a diversion. Unfortunately, she’s right.

“I am attempting to distract you from whatever made you--caused you discomfort earlier.” I refuse to reward her perspicuity with a lie. She nods, and her eyes abruptly flood again as she lays the stopwatch down on the table. After a heartbreaking moment of intense deliberation, she turns to me and deliberately holds her arms out.

I almost groan in relief as I pull her onto my lap, cradling her head against my shoulders as her breath hitches. She wraps her legs around my waist and clings so close that I can feel her tiny heart beating against my chest and I stare up at the ceiling for a moment willing away the irrational tightness in my own throat.

I wrap my arms around her and get to my feet, and we wander into the sitting room and stand before the window. She untucks her face from my neck and looks down onto the street, absently twining a few fingers into the curls at the nape of my neck.

“Your mother said that Miyah kept you awake all night,” I murmur to her. She arches back from me a bit, her scowl shunting tears to the sides of her face.

“It’s not her fault! She had a nightmare.”

I nod, well aware of Miyah’s occasional night terrors.

“You’re right, it’s not her fault. Neither is it yours.” She narrows her eyes at me again and looks so like John when he’s trying to figure out whether I’m having him on that I can’t suppress a smile.

“Not funny!” Her outraged squawk is accompanied by an impulsive pound of her fist on my shoulder.

“You look like your father when you squint like that, and it was amusing,” I say, capturing her little fist in my hand. “No hitting.”

“Sorry, Uncle ‘Lock, sorry, sorry,” she mutters, shifting rapidly from enraged to contrite. She pulls her fist out of my hand and pats my shoulder where she punched it before leaning back in and resting her cheek on it, sighing unhappily.

“Mum and dad stayed up all night with her,” she mutters after a few minutes. “They told me to go to sleep on the couch.”

“Obviously, they wanted you to be able to rest.”

“No! They wanted to spend time with Miyah! And they took her out today too!” Shirley sobs suddenly, her limbs contracting around me.

Ah. Well, this is much more familiar ground. Sibling rivalry is something with which I can very easily relate.

“They love you just as much as they love Miyah,” I say, firmly relating facts that, stated as plainly in my childhood, would have saved everyone infinite trouble.  She pushes back again to glare at me.

“That’s what they say. That’s what everyone says. But--” She sobs, pitching forward again into my shoulder.

“But recent data has skewed your perception,” I murmur, stroking her fine, tangled mop of hair.

“What’s skewed mean?”

“It means that you have been misled by your recent experience. Let’s do an experiment. I will prove to you that your parents love you as much as they love Miyah.”

“Prove it?”

“Beyond a doubt.”

She pulls back and squints at me again.

“You can _try_ ,” she says finally, her voice reeking with doubt.

I smirk and put her down and grab my notebook off of the kitchen table, sparing a glance for the fluid making its agonizingly slow way through the third of six chambers.

I settle on to the sofa and Shirley jumps up to take a seat next to me, burrowing under my arm against my side. After all this time I’m still unused to this amazing, casual intimacy and warmth floods my chest as she snuggles closer.

“What is our hypothesis, Shirley?”

It takes a moment for her to answer and I’m not sure whether she’s trying to remember what the word means or trying to phrase the context of our experiment correctly.

“That mum and dad love me and Miyah different amounts.”

I stare down at her, impressed despite myself. She’s effectively removed her own bias from her thesis-- something I’m not at all sure I could have done at her age.

“Very well,” I dutifully write the hypothesis on the pad and stare at it in consternation.

“Let us define measurable units,” I say after a while, stifling the unnerving feeling that I’m about to get sucked down a rabbit hole. “For the purposes of this experiment, how shall we define love?” After consideration, this might actually prove to be interesting after all.

“Attention!” Shirley says almost immediately. I write it down. After a few moments, she looks up at me. “Hugs.”

“Good, these are all quantifiable things.” I agree, writing ‘hugs’ down. Shirley screws her face up in concentration, before turning thoughtful then sly. She squints up at me out of the corner of her eye.  

“Liquorice Allsorts.”

“Manipulating the parameters of the experiment to increase your intake of sweets is not allowed.”

It takes her a minute to wrap her mind around that sentence but when she does she subsides with a huff and no argument.

“Kisses.”

“Acceptable.”

“Stories.”

“Very well.”

“Puppies.”

“Nope.”

“Ponies?”

“Definitely nope.”

“Snuggles.”

“Fine. That makes five measurable units. How shall we track them?”

“In a spreadsheet.” The _obvious_ rings unspoken in the air.  I blink several times.

“Of course. Let me get the laptop.” She waits patiently while I dig John’s old laptop out from under a stack of cold cases and get it started.

I pull up Excel and sit down with her and she immediately tucks herself back in against my side.

“How shall we set up the table?”

“Mummy and Daddy in the first column?” She squints at the monitor and smooths a few errant curls from her brow before pointing. “And then the other stuff on top. One tab for me and one for Miyah. Mine can be first.”

“Very good. But what about me?”

“Oh,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “I know _you_ love me, Uncle ‘Lock.”

I realize I have been staring at the ceiling, blinking fast for the past few seconds when she nudges me.  “Uncle ‘Lock?”

“What? Right. Yes. Typing.” I lay the chart out to her instructions and copy it into a new tab labeled ‘Miyah,’ working mechanically.

“Let’s say, a dataset of the past five days? Can you remember your interactions over that span of time?” The look she gives me is one I’ve seen in the mirror a thousand times. _Of course I can, idiot._

We spend the next twenty minutes reconstructing the past week of interactions with her mother and father and sister. After a few minutes I begin question my method of dealing with this and after ten, I am struggling not to panic.

Her recitation is quick and brutal and it might just be possible that John and Mary actually have been spending more time with Miyah lately due to totally unrelated reasons.

Thank merciful God, the data stands up to scrutiny in the end.

“See, Shirley? There’s only a 2% deviation between your parents’ interaction with your sister and with you, and you’ve actually come out on top. And I bet if we extended the time period, that percentage would shrink. For instance, did you or did you not accompany your father to work two weeks ago? That was just for you. Conclusion: they love you just as much as they love Miyah,” I say, leaning back against the cushions of the couch in relief.

“You’re right!” She squints at the monitor one last time, as though to verify her data. Her smile, when it lights up her face, resembles neither her mother nor her father. It is entirely her own and it rivals a locked-room murder in brilliance.

She launches herself at me and wrings my neck with her arms peppering kisses all over my face before bouncing off the sofa to confide her successes to her rabbit who had taken up residence in John’s chair.

I watch her, wondering for a moment how much different things would have been for Mycroft and myself had such an experiment born similar results. The familiar dig of pain stabs inward and I try to breathe through it, but am distracted by Shirley’s sudden stillness. She’s staring, wide-eyed, over the back of John’s chair into the kitchen.

“Uncle ‘Lock?” she spares me a glance. “Your table’s on fire.”

“Ah.”

I reach down to the side of the couch as oily smoke begins to curl across the ceiling and grasp the handle of one of the many extinguishers that I have placed around the flat over the past few months.

“ _This_ is why you must pay attention to your experiments more carefully.” Her admonishment is delivered pitch perfectly in John’s voice even as she vacates his chair and crosses to the window.

I cock my eyebrow as I pass her and she sniffs, screwing up her nose.

“It stinks. You _really_ ought to pay more attention Uncle ‘Lock.” She climbs up on the sill and reaches up to unlock the window. 

I hear her grunt and the squeal of the wood as the window opens.  I sigh and survey the table, which is, indeed, on fire.

“It’s just a little fire. Hardly more than a spark, for God’s sake,” I mutter. A quick burst of the extinguisher is all it takes, though even that is enough to knock over  the bunsen burner and beaker which shatters.

“Uncle Sherlock,” Shirley pipes up behind me, her voice now trenchant with disapproval. “Really, the _mess_ you’ve made.”

I take a moment to school my expression back to neutrality after Mrs. Hudson’s channeled appearance before turning back towards her.

“Perhaps you’ve noticed, Shirley, that this is actually _my_ flat. As such, I can make as much a mess as I choose.”

“Yeah, but just ‘cause you _can_ doesn’t mean you _should_.”

“You sound exactly like your father.”

“Good!”

She has a point.  I’m saved from trying to trump her by the slam of the front door and Miyah’s laughter. Suddenly there is a metre of female Watson crowding against me. I brace myself for a hug, but instead she pulls me down by the collar.

“Half a bag of Allsorts or I’ll tell dad that you caught your flat on fire with me in it!” She smirks.

“Quarter of a bag. It was your fault for distracting me!”

“Sherlock? Shirley? Are you two up there?” John’s voice echoes up the stairs, and Shirley squints at me opening her mouth to yell, but I clamp my hand over it.

“Fine. _Fine_ , my tiny tyrant. Half a bag delivered post-supper but you have to run interference.”

She nods in agreement and I release her mouth. She kisses my cheek and streaks through the door and down the stairs and into her father’s arms demanding kisses and tea and all manner of things. John laughs looks up the stairs at me over his daughter’s head.

“Still in one piece, I see. Tea in half an hour, Sherlock. Join us?”

“That depends on whether you’re still insisting on using that insipid Lipton trash.”

“Berk. We’ll see you in half an hour. Thanks for keeping an eye on this little one.”

I smile, meeting Shirley’s eyes as she twists towards me.

“Absolutely any time.”

 

 


End file.
